2011.02.24 Thursday

Woke up normal time, but today is different. Today, I will be going to the Palmer Event Center downtown to judge local area middle- and high-school students' science fair projects on behalf of my company. Very exciting, and at the same time I have no idea what to expect.

I should have expected traffic.

The judging was fun. Lots of very bright students out there. With all the negativity towards math and science in the media, it's good to see that there is still hope. Our team of judges just wanted to pick out the top projects that were related to our business, but we found that to be a tad challenging. One thing that also amazed me was the ability for these students to present themselves. I remember being pretty bad with presentations.

Slight tangent here: All through middle school and high school, up to about 10th grade, I had no problems with presentations. What changed? A required class called Speech. The class only lasted half of a school year. I had a few problems with this class. I had the teacher previously as an English teacher. I'm not sure why, but she started off already disliking me. She had a big problem with playing favorites with a small subset of students. Those students ended up getting high A's all the time, the rest of us scrounged for low B's and high C's. Add to that the fact that the teacher never really taught anything, but expected us to know everything in the book. The book made me super self-conscious about the tiniest things when giving a speech, like having arms above the waist and using good motions, projecting voice at appropriate volumes but varying it up to keep attention, expressing certain faces during critical points. The goal of the class should be to build up confidence in students, and feel free to express themselves, not beat them down for the stupid details. End tangent.

We deliberated and came up with a primary choice and backup choice for the winner of the award. I wanted to stick around, but felt obligated to get back to work. I don't want to get too far behind with my hours at work.

Work went by both quickly and slowly. It seemed like everybody was gone when I arrived. It was also rainy and gross outside. I grabbed a quick last-minute lunch at the cafeteria before they closed.

After work, I went straight over to Kelc's to hang out. We caught up on stuff happening within the last few days since we hadn't seen each other. Lots of changes happening.

We played a round of Scene-It, and a card game of I Have Never.

I went home, exhausted. Sleeeeeeep.